How RCA Victor sold Sound Service to classrooms in 1939
Comments
1Bas-12g
dtagames
It's fascinating to think that sound recording was so new it had to be explained. People needed examples of what someone would record or play back and why.
Every new technology goes through a period like this.
Stratoscope
The Bell System did this when dial telephone service was first introduced.
They held town meetings with a giant rotary dial onstage where someone explained it and demonstrated how to dial your calls.
And they made an instructional film about it!
dtagames
Thanks for the link. I love old educational films and that one was great!
BigTTYGothGF
The advertisement is too small for me to read, but in 1939 radio and recorded music had been around for decades.
dtagames
But they clearly didn't have market penetration.
Electric cars were invented before gas ones and still don't dominate in most countries, maybe only one?
BigTTYGothGF
> But they clearly didn't have market penetration
In 1939 80% of households had radios, there were over 1400 stations and 4 networks.
fuzzfactor
1939 is when the greatly improved tubes having "octal" base connections began to take over.
There were different executives getting bonuses from the institutional device sales than there were for the consumer radios and the factories that made the vacuum tubes.
Along with the media (78 rpm records) that was distributed by their record company whether it was recorded by their own artists in their own studios or not, with the tubes themselves you got to "own" them physically when you bought replacements. But like the 78s and the original tubes in the radios, they were only licensed for personal use.
For jukebox use, office music, or if you just wanted to play a retail radio, or records on your own in a place like a restaurant, there was a whole 'nother layer of licensing to be satisfied for both the media and the tubes it was playing through.
Does per-seat licensing ring a bell? Nothing new about that.
dtagames
I hear ya. I was more aiming at the idea that every new tech, no matter how transformative and later obvious, is not obvious nor even necessarily desirable to the population when it is introduced.
Tech needs explanation and even inducement to become popular, whereas useless tech like VR can't gain ground no matter how much it's demonstrated and hawked.
rconti
The original edutainment?
A "humans have always done it" advertisement for modern Internet "education":
"As you might have imagined, there are a lot of parallels between this and the internet in the education wave. Just like RCA, MOOCs (Coursera, Khan Academy, MIT OCW, and Stanford Online) let a kid anywhere access lectures from the best professors in real-time, no longer limited by what's available locally. Both waves bundled hardware and infrastructure, like Chromebooks and Raspberry Pi kits, with a promise of modernization. And finally, both seemed to arrive against the backdrop of a broader consumer technology boom."